PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF LEO BAKER, ENGLAND
Lot 198AR
Bernard Leach Charger with 'Tree of Life' design, 1925
7 December 2021, 10:00 GMT
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £61,500 inc. premium
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Shannon Brunette
Associate Specialist
Bernard Leach
Charger with 'Tree of Life' design, 1925
Earthenware, galena glaze over slip trailed and carved 'Tree of Life' design, incorporating bird feeding its young, song birds, mustangs, Ursa Major and two-headed dragon motifs.
50.5 cm diameter
Painted BL monogram, the reverse with painted BL monogram and dated 1925.
Earthenware, galena glaze over slip trailed and carved 'Tree of Life' design, incorporating bird feeding its young, song birds, mustangs, Ursa Major and two-headed dragon motifs.
50.5 cm diameter
Painted BL monogram, the reverse with painted BL monogram and dated 1925.
Footnotes
Provenance
Leo Baker, England, gifted by Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew, 1925
Thence by descent to the present owner
Literature
Oliver Watson, British Studio Pottery: The Victoria and Albert Museum Collection, Oxford, 1990, p. 47 for a similar example
Glenn Adamson, Martina Droth and Simon Olding, Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, New Haven, 2017, pp. 28, 162, 259 for a similar example
The present charger was gifted by Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew to Leo and Eileen Baker on the occasion of their wedding in 1925. A similar example is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The Estate of Leo Baker – lots 196-200
Leo Kingsley Baker (1898–1986), studied at Wadham College, Oxford, where he met the author C.S. Lewis – whose letters to Baker demonstrate a shared love of poetry. After taking his BA in 1922, Baker was from 1922 to 1925 an actor with the Old Vic Company under Lilian Baylis. In 1925 he married Eileen Brookes. Baker gave up the theatre owing to troubles resulting from war wounds, and he and his wife set up a handloom weaving business in Chipping Campden, known as the Kingsley Weavers.
Baker was good friends with Bernard Leach and in correspondence between them dated 1926, Baker states that he and his wife Eileen greatly enjoyed Leach's recent visit. In another letter dated 1925, Baker informs Leach that he is shortly to take a stall in the Ditchling Handworkers' Market and that Michael Cardew (a fellow student at Oxford and godfather to Baker's daughter) had seen some of his weaving. Entries in the diary of Bernard Leach, 1931, show that the friendship continued and Baker had visited Leach at his home in Carbis Bay.
The following lots 196-200 were either purchased by or gifted directly to Leo Baker.
Bonhams wishes to thank the family of Leo Baker for their assistance with the above biography.
Further information referenced from Alyn Giles Jones MA, Catalogue of the Additional Papers of Bernard Leach, Crafts Study Centre Bath, 1987.